Tavis Smiley says don't believe what you've heard or even what you read from the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign. The PBS and public radio talk-show host says he never turned down an offer to have Michelle Obama stand in for her husband at that year's State of the Black Union. Smiley insisted by email and by phone this week that no such offer was ever made. But had it been, he said, he'd have told Obama no, that he'd only talk to candidates, not spouses.

I said Smiley rebuffed Obama's offer to send his wife, but Smiley emailed, "Journalists are getting so lazy, just regurgitating the same old lies that have been circulating on the Internet for years. Michele Obama was NEVER offered to us. I corrected that lie on TJMS (the Tom Joyner Morning Show) immediately in 2008, but you keep spreading it."

Smiley is right. In February 2008, after the press published the campaign's letter, he said immediately that the Obama campaign had made no such offer. He said then that "my office was never contacted by the Obama campaign offering Michelle Obama as a proxy speaker. It never happened. No letter. No fax. No e-mail. No phone call. No document whatsoever from the Obama camp to my office, ever, regarding Michelle Obama. She was never offered, it was never discussed."

Then he said that "had she been offered to us I would have respectfully declined."

Regardless of anything that came before it, my reading of the letter is that it's an offer to send Michelle Obama in and of itself. Smiley doesn't see it that way and suggested on the phone Thursday that candidate Obama may have had no hand in it. He also directed me to a 2009 article in The Atlantic Magazine, where he said I'd find an Obama adviser admitting that the campaign chose to publicly reject Smiley's black-themed event to increase Obama's appeal to white voters.

But the magazine doesn't address the campaign's thoughts before the State of the Black Union -- just its thinking after black people gave Smiley holy hell for criticizing Obama's absence. An unnamed Obama adviser says the reaction revealed that Obama had become "untouchable in the community." Senior adviser Anita Dunn said, "Tavis Smiley was the object lesson for everyone."

Smiley acknowledged at Dillard that he had become persona non grata in the black community but said all he'd ever done was insist that black people hold Obama accountable. But ask a random black person who has an opinion about Smiley and you're likely to hear a story of Smiley rejecting Obama's offer to send his wife. It's just not true, Smiley says. Yes, he says, he would have rejected her; he also says he wasn't given that chance, despite the letter's claim.